I guess I knew, from a very young age, that ‘work’ was eventually doing to disappear. We’re eventually going to spend our time fishing… or reading romance novels… while robots handle the chores.
Robots were appearing on TV at a dizzying pace, back when I was a kid. Make-believe robots, of course. Like Rhoda, the female star of ‘My Living Doll’ — a robot created for the U.S Air Force, we were told, who somehow wound up in the hands of Dr. Bob McDonald. (Luckily for family audiences in 1964, Bob had rather chaste hands.)
The following year, we were introduced to Robot B9 in ‘Lost in Space’, and then in 1966, Hymie the Robot in ‘Get Smart’.
The evil ‘Fembots’ appeared in 1976, in an episode of ‘The Bionic Woman’. The Bionic Woman was only half-robotic, but pretty amazing nevertheless. You have to be especially careful about ‘fully-robotic’ women, however. They can easily turn evil, as we found out.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, robots were generally benign, kind-hearted servants of their creators. R2D2, and C3PO, for example. WALL-E. Data, from Star Trek.
But some imaginary robots, like the Fembots and the Terminator, left some people feeling anxious about the future of humankind.
Not me. I had been looking forward to a life where my every need is met by intelligent, robotic caretakers.
“Robby,” I will say, sitting in my recliner, “pour me a glass of my best red wine.”
Robby will know which wine I mean, even if I myself have no idea.
Or maybe the robot’s name is ‘Roberta’.
We must, however, draw the line somewhere. And soon, I think.
Robots are already helping to weld and paint our cars and trucks, and now I see where fast-food outlet Chipotle has hired Chippy, an AI kitchen assistant, to help make its tortilla chips. Chipotle purposely programmed Chippy to have some inconsistency in results, to mimic the technique of the humans who currently produce the chain’s chips.
I mean, who wants perfect chips? Not me.
But all this nonsense about AI replacing writers. That, I’m not happy about.
If I were stuck all day, working at a fast-food restaurant making inconsistent chips… sure, I wouldn’t mind letting a robot take my job. Because I knew I could always get a job writing a humor column for an obscure news website.
I mean, yeah, I’m all in favor of robots handling the fried tortilla chips, but… not my job.
One weird thing about how robots turned out. We thought they’d look like people, but they don’t.
The ones that are assembling the Tesla cars in Austin, Texas, for example, look more like metallic giraffes, or maybe enormous insects.
Human beings have a physical structure adapted to an amazing range of activities, but we don’t actually do anything particularly well. Fishing, maybe. (But even that can be a challenge.)
For most automated jobs, it would be stupid to build a robot that looks, or acts, like a human being.
So it’s not surprising that the clever AI robots that are scheming to take my job as a humor writer, don’t actually look like anything at all. They live inside a computer, as invisible software. Doing their dirty work, hidden inside little silicon chips.
“Come out and show your faces!” I would scream. But they don’t have faces.
Earlier this year, journalist Thomas Moore Devlin wrote about the coming disaster for Babbel Magazine.
All that said, the next decade is likely to completely transform writing, which will create both helpful solutions and new problems. While we haven’t discussed it much here, the use of AI to create mountains of disinformation is a real threat.
If anyone is going to create mountains of disinformation for the Daily Post, I hope it’s me.
If not, there’s always fishing.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.